Hello, Ross. I noted with great interest Socialtext's submission of
Common Public Attribution License to OSI, at the beginning of July, and
in fact posted favourable comments on it to the license-discuss mailing
list, at that time. The OSI Board then, of course, approved it on July
25.
Since then, your firm's press releases and numerous bits of news
coverage (The Register, CMS Wire, eWeek, and quite a few others) have
proclaimed your firm's conversion of Socialtext Open to this new
OSI-certified licence.
In addition, your firm's Web pages began prominently featuring OSI's
"OSI Certified" regulated certification mark logo, which may be used
only for codebases released under OSI certified open source licences.
So, I am obliged to ask: When will your product actually use CPAL?
To date, it is not. To wit:
o The SourceForge.net project at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/socialtext/ has, as the latest
downloadable tarball, Socialtext Open release 2.11.6.1. It's perhaps
understandable that _that_ form of access to source code still gets the
user only code under the "Socialtext Public Licence 1.0" MPL 1.1 +
Exhibit B badgeware licence -- because that tarball, your latest full
release, was dated May 22, 2007, prior to your CPAL announcements.
o However, what's a bit more difficult to understand is that following
hyperlinks for source code access on your coprorate Web site takes you
to http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?socialtext_open_source_code,
which cites a svn command to check the "head" development codebase out
of repo.socialtext.net -- and _that_ code, your very latest developer
code, is _likewise_ under Socialtext Public Licence 1.0.
So, when is Socialtext going to actually _use_ the OSI-certified licence
that it's been claiming in public to be using?
Also, would you mind please removing the "OSI Certified" logo from your
pages until such time as you are legally entitled to use it? Thank you.
As a reminder, I called your attention here on December 29, 2006 to your
then-advertised wiki page http://www.socialtext.net/stoss/ claiming in
error that Socialtext had submitted SPL 1.0 to OSI's certification
process, when it had not done so. You acknowledged the critique, but
Socialtext did not fix the misstatement of fact until I reminded you of
it a second time, here, on January 22, 2007. I hope that your
firm's correction of its erroneous public licensing information, this
time, will be significantly faster.
Best Regards,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
(speaking only for himself)